There are several computer system architectures that support distributed use of data over computer networks. These computer system architectures are used in applications such as corporate intranets, distributed database applications and video-on-demand services.
Video-on-demand services, for example, typically are designed with an assumption that a user will request an entire movie, and that the selected movie has a substantial length. The video-on-demand server therefore is designed to support read-only access by several subscribers to the same movie, possibly at different times. Such servers generally divide data into several segments and distribute the segments sequentially over several computers or computer disks. This technique commonly is called striping, and is described, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,473,362, 5,583,868 and 5,610,841. One problem with striping data for movies over several disks is that failure of one disk or server can result in the loss of all movies, because every movie has at least one segment written on every disk.
A common technique for providing reliability in data storage is called mirroring. A hybrid system using mirroring and sequential striping is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,559,764 (Chen et al.). Mirroring involves maintaining two copies of each storage unit, i.e., having a primary storage and secondary backup storage for all data. Both copies also may be used for load distribution. Using this technique however, a failure of the primary storage causes its entire load to be placed on the secondary backup storage.
Another problem with sequentially striping data over several disks is the increased likelihood of what is called a Aconvoy effect. A convoy effect occurs because requests for data segments from a file tend to group together at a disk and then cycle from one disk to the next (a Aconvoy≅). As a result, one disk may be particularly burdened with requests at the one time while other disks have a light load. In addition, any new requests to a disk must wait for the convoy to be processed, thus resulting in increased latency for new requests. In order to overcome the convoy effect, data may be striped in a random fashion, i.e., segments of a data file is stored in a random order among the disks rather than sequentially. Such a system is described in A Design and Performance Tradeoffs in Clustered Video Servers, by R. Tewari, et. al., in Proceedings of Multimedia '96, pp. 144–150. Such a system still may experience random, extreme loads on one disk, however, due to the generally random nature of data accesses.
None of these systems is individually capable of transferring multiple, independent, high bandwidth streams of data, particularly isochronous media data such as video and associated audio data, between multiple storage units and multiple applications in a scalable and reliable manner. Such data transfer requirements are particularly difficult in systems supporting capture, authoring and playback of multimedia data. In an authoring system in particular, data typically is accessed in small fragments, called clips, of larger data files. These clips tend to be accessed in an arbitrary or random order with respect to how the data is stored, making efficient data transfer difficult to achieve.